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Psychology in UX

The term, User Experience (UX) is one of the most popular terms nowadays everywhere in the world. There are a lot of controversies around how it’s being misused and spammed all across the industries and academia but there is no doubt that it has now become one of the buzzwords of the decade. As a psychologist freshly out of college or having previous background knowledge in psychology, do you happen to know what “UX” means? Well if you do, that’s great! If not, you can find a lot of resources out there that explains about it.

Last week, Facebook rolled out an update to the design of its News Feed. The design tweaks—near imperceptible pixel spacing and color enhancements—were meant to make Facebook’s infinitely updating cascade of stories even easier to consume and comment on. “Small changes, like a few extra pixels of padding or the tint of a button, can have large and unexpected repercussions,” wrote Facebook design leads Shali Nguyen and Ryan Freitas in an Aug 15 Medium post about the update. One of the objectives for the update was to find a way to make Facebook even more “engaging and immersive.”

Human Cognition

Mental models are one of the most important concepts in human-computer interaction (HCI). Indeed, we spend a good deal of time covering their design implications in our full-day training course on User Interface Principles. Here, I'll report a few examples from our usability studies. Not coincidentally, using concrete examples often helps people understand abstract concepts (such as "mental models"). First, though, you have to suffer one bit of theory — namely the definition of mental models. A mental model is what the user believes about the system at hand...

A preattentive visual property is one which is processed in spatial memory without our conscious action. In essence it takes less than 500 milliseconds for the eye and the brain to process a preattentive property of any image. This is good news for information visualization designers and graphic designers in more general terms too – it means that these properties can be harnessed to make it easier for a user to understand what is presented through the design and save them from consciously processing all the data presented in short-term memory which requires more effort.

Human, AI and UX

Machine learning (ML) is the science of helping computers discover patterns and relationships in data instead of being manually programmed. It’s a powerful tool for creating personalized and dynamic experiences, and it’s already driving everything from Netflix recommendations to autonomous cars. But as more and more experiences are built with ML, it’s clear that UXers still have a lot to learn about how to make users feel in control of the technology, and not the other way round.

It seems like we're on the cusp of doing amazing things with chatbots and data mining, which can augment manual information architecture work and result in a better user experience overall. Automated information processing can help us identify search patterns and recommend information structures, to improve the findability of content. How AI + UX = Better Findability? Let's say you have a service that includes a search component. Right now, your users might be running searches and using manual filters to sort through the results, as search users are wont to do.

Books and Resources 📖

‘Neuromarketing’ is a term that has often been used in the media in recent years. These public discussions have generally centered around potential ethical aspects and the public fear of negative consequences for society in general, and consumers in particular. However, positive contributions to the scientific discourse from developing a biological model that tries to explain context-situated human behavior such as consumption have often been neglected. We argue for a differentiated terminology, naming commercial applications of neuroscientific methods ‘neuromarketing’ and scientific ones ‘consumer neuroscience’. While marketing scholars have eagerly integrated neuroscientific evidence into their theoretical framework, neurology has only recently started to draw its attention to the results of consumer neuroscience.